His Own Brother Sold Him Into Slavery

By Rob Schwarzwalder Published on February 22, 2018

Imagine being sold by your own brother into slavery.

This isn’t about Joseph and his brothers. It’s about an African-American hero named Francis Grimke (1850-1937).

Francis was one of three sons born to Henry Grimke and his slave, Nancy Weston. After his father died, he lived free for a few years. His all-white brother Montagu persuaded him to return to the family home in Charleston. Montagu made Francis a servant. Francis ran away after his brother brutally beat him. But Montagu found him and sold him to a Rebel officer.

After the war, Francis went to a school for freed slaves in Charleston and then went to Lincoln College in Pennsylvania. The talented young man graduated as valedictorian of his class and started law school at Howard University.

However, he soon heard a different call. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1878. At age 28, he was appointed to the 15th Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. He served the church for nearly 60 years.

What Kind of Man?

In his first three decades of life, he had gone from an abused and enslaved boyhood to earning a college degree, ordination in the Presbyterian Church, and graduation from the premier seminary in the country. What kind of man was he?

Grimke was a master of the spoken word. “I have heard him preach,” the president of Princeton Seminary said of him. “I feel as if I could listen to such preaching with profit from Sabbath to Sabbath.”

More importantly, he was a man of the Word of God. “I accept, and accept without reservation, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as God’s Word, sent to Adam’s sinful race and pointing out the only way by which it can be saved,” he said. “Without the Holy Scriptures and what they reveal, there is no hope for humanity. To build on anything else is to build on the sand.”

Racism Offends the Lord

He knew the horror of racism. He also recognized it offended the Lord Who “from one man He made every nation of men, to inhabit the whole earth” (Acts 17:26).

Because he believed so deeply in the Bible and the transforming power of Christ, Grimke was a passionate advocates for racial justice. “Race prejudice is … shared equally by so-called professing Christians,” he lamented in a 1910 sermon. This was wrong. “There is not to be found anywhere in the religion of Jesus Christ anything upon which [racial bigotry] can stand, anything by which it can be justified, or even extenuated.”

Another time he said, “Accepting Jesus Christ in reality and not in pretense carries along with it brotherhood.” That brotherhood “so presents Jesus Christ that men see, and see plainly, what is involved in accepting him.” One thing definitely not involved was racism.

With his equally talented brother Archibald, Francis was active in the Niagara Movement for racial equality and the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP was not then a forum of anti-Republicanism but a nationwide coalition for racial justice.

Most African-Americans of Grimke’s era were Republicans. The Party of Lincoln had freed them. The then- “solid South” was the home of racist Democratic politicians, Jim Crow laws and white-hooded “knights” who terrorized by moonlight.

Grimke and Woodrow Wilson

So Grimke viewed the 1912 election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson with great concern. But then he read an article in which Wilson urged Bible study. Grimke wrote his fellow Presbyterian a heart-felt letter. He told Wilson that “no American, white or black, need have any reasonable grounds for fear” from his administration. He pointed to Wilson’s belief in the Bible. No one could fear someone who accepts “the great [and] eternal … principles of righteousness for which that Word stands.”

His hope that Wilson would champion human equality was soon disappointed. Wilson made very few black appointments. He not only defended but expanded segregation in the federal civil service. He allowed offices to force black workers to use segregated bathrooms and set up screens to keep black and white workers apart.

Grimke wrote a second letter to Wilson in 1913. It was respectful but blunt. “As an American citizen I desire to enter my earnest protest against the disposition, under your Administration, to segregate colored people in the various departments of the Government. To do so is undemocratic, is un-American, is un-Christian, is needlessly to offend the self-respect of the local black citizens of the Republic.”

Wilson did not appreciate the way black leaders held him accountable for institutional and social bigotry. When some met with him in 1914, he showed them the door after they challenged his tolerance of federal re-segregation.

Jesus’s Transforming Power

Francis Grimke continued to call for racial justice all his life. As Christians think about such issues as abortion, religious liberty, racial justice, same-sex marriage, we can learn not only from his courage but from its source.

“The transforming power of Jesus Christ in us and over us is the only evidence of faith in Him that saves,” he proclaimed. “How poor, how unspeakably poor are those without a living faith in God and in His Son Jesus Christ!”

Amen, Rev. Grimke. Amen.

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